Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE
Editorial for Vol. 2 no. 1 of the PRS-LTSN Journal.
Author: David Mossley
Journal Title: PRS-LTSN Journal
ISSN:
ISSN-L:
Volume: 2
Number: 1
Start page: 4
End page: 4
Return to vol. 2 no. 1 index page
This is the third issue of the PRS-LTSN Journal. We are now publishing the output from the projects and mini-projects we have been funding over the last twelve months. This means that we are making available some of the best subject-specific learning and teaching scholarship and practical teaching advice in the PRS disciplines in the UK.
Each of the project reports printed below tackles a different important issue that lecturers and tutors are currently confronting. Each has its origins in a different subject area, but offers real advice and scholarly consideration of matters that are of concern to all.
Jarvis and Cain’s excellent and detailed survey of research on the diversification of forms of assessment in essay writing and examinations is nominally addressed to those teaching history of science, but has obvious and timely application to all the disciplines supported by the PRS-LTSN. This report is only the first part of Jarvis and Cain’s research; once published, the whole series will form a comprehensive account of the means by which changes in modes of assessment can dramatically improve the student learning experience. I heartily recommend this project report as a well-researched and important resource that all should keep close to hand when examining departmental assessment practices.
Crosby, Pattison and Skilton address a perennial problem for our disciplines, how to properly integrate questioning into topics where students have strongly held beliefs. Again, the application may be extended; although their research and experiences have a locus in theology and religious studies, their insights are also germane in areas of philosophy that touch on fundamental beliefs and real life ethical situations. The survey of student attitudes and the exercises that the authors used are printed here to help staff explore students’ beliefs and attitudes. This should give an informed picture of those aspects of the programmes, units or courses that students find most challenging or even invasive. I am sure that the exercises can be adapted for other TRS courses and for PRS generally. Hawley introduces us to a peer-led group work practice in philosophy that encourages reading and discussion amongst students. Its application to all PRS subjects—that rely so much on close textual work and discursive examination of concepts and abstract ideas— is immediate and clear. It is an excellent model for the development of future programmes where pressures to increase student numbers will force a re-examination of the traditional teaching methods. It is important that the discursive “face-to-face” nature of our disciplines isn’t lost in the struggle to deliver to greater numbers with relatively reduced resources.
Finally, Sellars’ overview of current trends in the scholarship of philosophy learning and teaching provides an excellent introduction to a number of themes for debate in which I hope you will participate.
I am particularly pleased to publish these three reports and Sellars’ article, as they demonstrate how the PRS-LTSN (and the LTSN as a whole) has moved forward in generating fresh subject-specific debate and scholarship in a relatively short period of time. The funding councils, working to their given government targets, have set objectives that we will find hard to meet if we wish to retain the quality of the education we deliver to students. However, the agenda may not be impossible to address if we attempt to find what is distinctive and worth preserving in the best of our current practices. There may be real and hard questions to be asked about just what learning in philosophy, theology and so on, is supposed to be. But unless there is some scholarly basis for these discussions, all that is valuable will be lost before we have even considered what this learning is. We all know the importance of clear evidence and analysis in our research for carrying forward arguments and discussion. Without similar evidence and analysis of learning, teaching and assessment, we have no position from which to argue a case for alternative targets and objectives. Falling back on traditions devised for a previous period in higher education will certainly not help us at this time.
Return to vol. 2 no. 1 index page
This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.
